Are Human Bodies the Future of Green Energy?

The biggest waste of energy does not come from the lights you leave on or the air conditioner that's running all day while you're at work. It comes from your body and its everyday movements. Kinetic energy, the energy produced when objects move, is continually being created by humans as we walk, run, bike, mow the lawn, and play with the kids in the backyard. It is the foundation of many of our ways of producing electricity now, including wind and water turbines. It is 100 percent renewable and doesn't cost a dime. The challenge, however, is how to harness it. Read on for some of the ways this challenge is being tackled.

The Power of One

The first problem is that human kinetic energy is very low yield. One person's normal daily motion could barely keep a light bulb lit. But if developments such as Dickson's Human Kinetic Energy Electrical Generator (pictured above left) come to fruition, you could carry it around to trickle-charge the batteries of your portable devices (MP3 players, cell phones, PDAs, and so on). And those of you old enough may remember Seiko's kinetic watches of the 1960s and 70s, which needed no battery, and kept ticking by storing kinetic power from the arm movements of the wearer. Think of the electric savings if everyone self-sufficiently kept their gadgets going without having to plug in chargers.

The Power of Many

Though one body produces a relatively minuscule amount of electricity, multiply that amount by millions or even billions. Harnessing the people power of our crowded planet can have a titanic effect. This concept, called "crowd farming," is at the forefront of several research projects.

One of the most promising is the Crowd Farm project, created by M.I.T. graduate students James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk. They are proposing installing a responsive sub-flooring system in Boston's South Station railway terminal that would depress slightly when walked upon, generating kinetic energy. Though it sounds expensive, the tiles would be placed only in the most high-traffic areas, such as in front of turnstiles. A similar system is being tested at an East Japan Railway station in Shibuya.

So what about most of the U.S., which is not as densely populated as a major city and where most people get around by car instead of walking or public transit? The crowd farming concept could also be applied to auto travel. Companies such as Hughes Research are developing an Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp (pictured below), which works on the same basic premise of depressing when cars drive over it. Even a small-scale pilot project on the nation's busiest freeways could yield big results.

Sweatricity

Nearly every day I walk past the big display windows of high-priced gyms in Manhattan, watching people churning away on treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. And I think about all that wasted energy. The motion produced basically replicates a turbine. Why not harness it?

If every gym (or even one gym chain, such as Crunch, YMCA, Bally's, or Curves) hooked up their machines to a kinetic generator that either went back into the grid or at least powered the lights and TV screens of that location, it would go a long way toward lowering consumption. And you might even spend a few more minutes on the elliptical, fearing your TV screen might go black at a crucial moment in "Lost."

Researchers at the University of Stirling in Scotland have developed a grid that can store energy gleaned from generators connected to rowing machines, exercise bikes, and treadmills. The power is stored similarly to that of wind farms and wave machines. The researchers estimate that each person could product about 300 watts of electricity during a workout, enough to power a household appliance for about an hour. The team is currently marketing the technology to fitness centers in the U.K.

The only way any of these projects are going to get off the ground in the States is for us regular folk to start harassing our elected officials and civil servants. Send letters, make phone calls, blog about it: The future of sustainable energy consumption could be right inside us.

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